16 Conclusions from Liverpool 1-2 Man City: Chaos, Bluey, VAR, Guehi, Szoboszlai, Haaland

The title race is alive and well (kind of) after a genuinely ludicrous conclusion at Anfield saw Man City claim a 2-1 win over Liverpool that cuts Arsenal’s lead at the summit back to six. Which should be enough, but is definitely still a bit dicey in a way nine points absolutely would not have been.

City trailed with seven minutes remaining and led by the first minute of injury time, yet somehow that managed not to be the main talking point from a game that took 73 minutes to get going at all but thoroughly rewarded those who stuck with it.

This might be the most second-half-centric 16 Conclusions yet. It definitely contains above-average levels of Bluey.

1. There’s only one place to start after that, isn’t there? That’s right, with the iconic Bluey episode, Shadowlands. Real ones will know.

The entire discourse in the wake of the astonishing conclusion and Man City’s disallowed third goal at Anfield is just the plot from that season one episode, one of the early standouts that told us all we were dealing with something more than just some kids’ show here.

The episode is, at its core, a battle between Bluey’s hardline ‘rules are rules’ stance even when playing made-up games in the park, and her friend Coco’s willingness and even at times desperation to just change them when it makes things easier or more fun.

Bluey: “You can’t just change the rules!”

Coco: “But you still haven’t told me why!”

Bluey: “Well, because… (tries to think of a reason, but can’t) I don’t know!”

Coco: “See? There’s no reason.”

That really is where everyone’s at with the goal that wasn’t. You’re either Bluey, insisting the goal must be disallowed because you can’t just blow up the rules when the vibes demand, or you’re Coco.

For what it’s worth, Coco ends the episode going over to the dark side and concluding that rules make things fun in a bleak and challenging conclusion to an episode serving early notice of the series’ prestige TV credentials.

Our view is that this ending (to the game at Anfield, not to Shadowlands) might genuinely be the best possible outcome for those of us who dream of a future where VAR is gone altogether.

Because the decision that has agitated everyone’s p*ss here didn’t actually impact the result of the game – and if that one goal does end up impacting the title race then we’re all in for an absolute treat anyway. But it does appear to have radicalised many more against VAR’s joyless, soul-sapping, lawsplaining ‘Well, actually…’ inevitabilities.

2. It is the ultimate ALL WE WANT IS CONSISTENCY UNLESS ALL WE WANT IS COMMON SENSE decision. Common sense tells you it’s a goal (also because that is the funniest outcome from this scenario, which should always be the main criterion). But consistency requires the letter of the law to be followed, and those laws don’t allow for it to be a goal, so with VAR it can’t be one.

A striker can’t just foul a defender because the defender has fouled him. This is not a complicated or outlier position to hold. We all instinctively know and accept this in the myriad examples that occur in more mundane and customary scenarios than this specific and unlikely one where the outcome that feels most just is not and cannot be written into law.

And while we’re here it’s not ‘six of one and half a dozen of the other’ either. This is six of one and then a retaliatory half a dozen of the very similar. That’s a key difference.

If you want that goal to stand, then you are on the side of referees being able to deploy common sense in certain situations and are thus a VAR abolitionist whether you’ve yet realised it or not. Because there are limits to the coherent positions you can take here.

You can be pro-VAR and happy with that decision because the only correct decision has been reached as permitted by the laws of the game. And that is all VAR can ever be interested in doing.

You can be anti-VAR and think that in the specific set of absurd and outlandish circumstances that played out here in which Dominik Szoboszlai clearly fouls Erling Haaland and then Erling Haaland clearly fouls Dominik Szoboszlai before Rayan Cherki’s long-range SCREAMER trundles over the line that a moral equilibrium has been achieved and that balance is restored to the universe by taking a common-sense approach and allowing the goal to stand.

What you can’t really do is take the Gary Neville position of “I like VAR but sometimes it should make decisions based on nebulous vibes rather than reach what is objectively the only correct if infuriatingly joyless and unsatisfactory conclusion.”

3. Before we finally move on from a goal that didn’t count in a game containing some quite important ones that did, a couple more observations if you’ll indulge us.

That is, from Szoboszlai, one of the thickest things we’ve ever seen a top-class professional footballer do. So stupid was it, in fact, that we’ve heard several of the defences of the original decision to award the goal reference the fact it would in fact have been a better outcome for Liverpool.

In this they’re right. Liverpool would have been better off losing 3-1 and having Szoboszlai available for the game against Sunderland than losing 2-1 and being without him in what is now a crucial game in the battle for European qualification.

But that observation carries more weight as a criticism of Szoboszlai than it does of VAR’s decision-making process. Because he created this situation. He had a choice between losing 2-1 and getting sent off or losing 3-1 and not getting sent off. He chose the former. He chose… poorly.

4. A further point of boring but necessary order is that just before everything that happened happened, Liverpool had penalty appeals waved away. We assume VAR checked and cleared it, but everyone else seemed to stop caring very quickly when something funnier and shinier came along to hog all the attention.

And a final, final point. We have nothing but respect for Alisson’s commitment to the bit. Having decided he was staying upfield, he really leant into it, making no real attempt at all to get back into his usual position .

5. Guess we might as well work backwards and get to a big moment that actually did affect the outcome, and how. Perhaps Alisson’s desperation to get himself a last-gasp goal was out of an understandable desire to make amends for the uncharacteristically witless decision to throw himself into a challenge on Matheus Nunes he would never win from a position that really wasn’t that encouraging for City. Nunes’ touch was always going to take the ball out of play.

For all the furious debate and discussion about what happened in the chaotic minutes after City’s winning goal, this was really the key moment of the whole game. A brainfade from an unlikely source that dents Liverpool’s season but might just have revitalised City’s.

6. We also very much enjoyed the sight of Erling Haaland, as the VAR did its necessary checks and confirmations, simply standing around holding the ball and chatting jovially with Liverpool players – including former team-mate Szoboszlai, with whom he was about to engage in less harmonious exchange.

Guess there’s not really a lot of point partaking in the modern pantomime of deploying a fake taker in these situations when your actual taker is the GoalBot 3000. Even in its slightly malfunctioning form, he cannot be rattled and nobody would be fooled anyway.

His first Premier League goal at Anfield was one of his most important in Our League. Seven minutes earlier the title race was over.

7. Let’s go back to the start of the game now. A start which came, unusually, in the 74th minute at Anfield. For the previous 73 minutes, on the back of an unflushed turd of a game between Brighton and Crystal Palace, we were genuinely starting to wonder if this might in fact be the worst Super Sunday on record.

As an aside here, while it’s inevitable that Arsenal fans are going to be feeling a little bit of rattle about how this game ended, the rational view remains that Arsenal have more than enough. The fear is understandable because rationality has never been a key weapon in the football fan armoury. It’s an emotional endeavour with the subjectivity that brings, but the wild conclusion to this match shouldn’t detract from what remains true in both the league table and the eye test: this version of Manchester City are neither as good nor effective a football team as this version of Arsenal.

The likelihood remains that in title race terms this game ends up little more than a footnote, remembered as a more entertaining encounter for how it finished than the reality of the vast majority.

8. It all burst into life with another Szoboszlai special. We are now entering the realm of ‘Szoboszlai Territory’ to describe the area pretty much dead centre but apparently just too far out for a mortal man to consider attempting a shot against a goalkeeper of the size and ability of Gianluigi Donnarumma.

That this was from pretty much the same blade of grass as the free-kick back in the early days of the season against Arsenal was lost on nobody. And for 10 minutes it really did look like this one might carry more significance for Arsenal than the one scored against them.

It was an extraordinary strike, travelling in a straight line for the first half of its flight before arcing prodigiously to rattle the goalframe and settle in the back of the net. For a shot from that distance to leave Donnarumma rooted to the spot is astounding.

9. We do wonder about the two-man wall, though. Ordinarily, that would be plenty for a free-kick of this type. But there is nothing ordinary about Szoboszlai’s ability from this distance. It might be that what City put in his way there was actually the worst possible choice, because they almost acted as markers.

Watch it again, and you’ll see that the ball’s flight path takes it directly through the space that would have been occupied by a third member of the wall stood next to Rodri. Now we don’t doubt that had a third man been there Szoboszlai would simply have found another route around or over them.

But they did seem to show him the ideal way to go. Given the path the ball took, the wall contributed nothing other than providing a guideline for the Hungarian. Even no wall at all would at least have avoided that.

10. At that point, City were having a second half every bit as bad as the one they endured at Tottenham last week.

We didn’t make many notes on the first half, but one thing we did jot down was that these teams’ recent work meant 0-0 was a better half-time score for Liverpool than City.

City had been the better (less bad?) team in a first half where they had 10 shots on Alisson’s goal but few memorably clear sights of it after an early smother from a Haaland chance. It didn’t feel like City were banging the door down.

11. And they certainly weren’t in the second half, where even the one good chance they did create, lashed into Alisson’s midriff by Antoine Semenyo, had the unintended consequence of creating Liverpool’s best chance of the game.

Alisson’s quick clearance prompted a panicked half-clearance and left Liverpool with a four-on-three that Hugo Ekitike will not want to watch back.

He made three errors in the space of a few seconds. First he went left to Mo Salah when he should have gone right to Florian Wirtz. Then he misplaced that pass anyway behind Salah instead of into the space in front of him.

And then, when Salah still somehow dug out a mischievous cross with the outside of his boot, Ekitike headed the chance wide when in prime He Has To Score territory.

Ekitike has been having a particularly good spell in a very good first season in England, but this was not his day and very few Not His Days have ever been more succinctly summed up.

12. But it didn’t look like it was going to matter. City looked broken and beaten by Szoboszlai’s latest outlandish strike. There was an air of going through the motions about their attempts to get back into the game, just as there was to their attempts to regain their inexplicably lost control at Spurs.

City didn’t look like they believed it could happen, which only made it more striking when it did. We think Gary Neville might have manifested the whole thing out of sheer desire to see a proper title race.

Szoboszlai’s hero-to-zero arc hit another key plot point with the equaliser. He was out of position and out of step with the rest of Liverpool’s back four as a deflected cross was nodded into Bernardo Silva’s path by Haaland.

Szoboszlai scoring a goal of that quality and then making a mistake of such basic humdrummery felt cruel.

But also a reminder that while Szoboszlai is a good enough footballer to make a go of playing as a Trent-style right-back-cum-playmaker, it is not and never will be his natural position.

We understand why Arne Slot likes to do it, and it is sometimes through necessity, but Liverpool need a better option next season if they are to get back in a position of major character in the title race rather than an obstacle the main guys have to get past at the end of act two.

Apparently there’s a handy sort struggling to get a game at Real Madrid? Could be worth a look?

13. We remain unconvinced in general by Slot’s fondness for shoehorning as many attacking players as possible into his side.

But we suppose you have to slightly admire a man for sticking to it even against a team like City. It just doesn’t seem like a very good idea, though. Liverpool’s preferred current front four of Gakpo, Wirtz, Salah and Ekitike is one that asks a huge amount of a midfield that also contains the attack-minded Alexis Mac Allister and a defence that features the attack-minded Dominik Szoboszlai.

There comes a point where just having lots of attacking players stops being an attacking option because you cede too much control. From the very start of this season, a Liverpool team that won the title so impressively on the back of exerting unstinting control on proceedings have allowed chaos to flourish.

They are often arguably more watchable for it, but so much less effective.

14. While there was still so very much time here for further chaos after it, let’s not forget this was the fourth winning goal Liverpool have conceded this season beyond the 90-minute mark. That’s as many winning goals as they conceded altogether in the Premier League during the whole of last season, and equals a record shared by, among other, last season’s infamously and historically abysmal Southampton side.

For a team that started the season setting about what looked like being a fine defence of their title by making a habit of scoring dramatic late winners, it’s an astonishing statistic.

15. While the focus, inevitably and understandably, was on what City’s comeback means for the title race, it seems far more likely that the real significance of this result, if any, lies in the pursuit of the minor placings.

Liverpool are now in a desperate scrap for Champions League football even with fifth place almost certainly being good enough. There is little current evidence to suggest Liverpool are about to reel in the four-point gap Chelsea have opened up, while who knows how long and how far Michael Carrick’s club-knowledge can carry Man United but it does look like it might be quite far.

Even a stuttering Aston Villa still look out of reach for an equally-stuttery Liverpool. Villa have taken just five points from their last five, yet their advantage over Liverpool still down outside the Champions League places remains the same.

The fact Brentford have endured all they have over the last year or so and yet now find themselves sitting a single goal scored behind Liverpool in the Premier League is a staggering achievement on their part but damns Arne Slot and his men.

16. Was the booing of Marc Guehi the first recorded instance of a crowd turning on someone for almost being a former player?